Yesterday I ventured back into the gym, now that my piriformis muscle has somewhat recovered from the excessive amount of overtime that I had subjected myself to over the last month and a half.
It was the same gym as always, and I've noticed that there was a huge drop in my general cardio-vascular fitness - evidenced by the fact that it took me a whole 12 minutes to cover 2 kilometers on the treadmill, something that I had until recently been doing in about eleven minutes consistently.
That's a pretty significant degradation if you're talking about percentages.
Weights, on the other land (literally) felt really good. I don't feel as though I've lost any strength through my back or legs, and managed to power through multiple, heavy exercises without too much difficulty.
Today, as a result, I have some soreness in my forearms, suggesting that my grip strength had weakened a little bit, or at the very least, I had to managed to successfully isolate enough to get some destruction of muscle tissue through that area.
In any case, I feel good.
I will be continuing to work on my core at least two sessions a week, which will be coupled with cardio. The remaining three days of training will be strength based, and I will be doing 5x5, which is 5 sets of 5 exercises, each day, three days a week to build strength through compound movements and slowly increase the weight.
Then, after Christmas, I'll return to a functional style of training.
At least that's the plan. I've just got to be consistent now.
